The things you'd never do

As a five-year addict to Facebook, it may seem perfectly hypocrital for me to stand up on my soapbox and criticize it, but that's exactly what I'm going to do. Not because I'm above it, but because I am powerless without it, and the best defense twenty-something wanna-be-writers have these days is the blogosphere. So here it goes.

Everything everyone does appears online. What you ate for breakfast. Where you bought that dress. How long you've been dating your boyfriend. What you did last night. Who you did last night. And all this is fine and good, because it gives people a sense of celebrity, it somehow validates their existence...but somewhere along the line it began to feel like an event didn't actually occur unless there was record of it on Facebook. And this notion continued to evolve to the point until my greatest fear has been realized: people are doing things JUST so they can record it on Facebook.

I want to gather all my Facebook 'friends' in a room and shout at the top of my lungs, "Would you really have traveled to South Africa if you couldn't post the pictures?" "Are you sure you want to marry him?" "Are those kids just for show?"

"Facebook stunts" as I like to call them, are the manipulation and editing of one's life to make it appear more glamourous, more exciting. You know, kind of like how you post the pictures of yourself with freshly applied makeup, posing like a movie star, at the beginning of a night out, and purposefully leave out the other pictures where you're devouring a large pizza late-night. Engagements, smiling kids, family vacations. I'm getting to the point where when I look through someone's album and it seems just so perfectly put together, I think, what happened next? What's the rest of the story?

Insanity aside, a cultural phenomenon is undoubtedly occuring here. People are subconciously making decisions and doing things because they are motivated by the fact that record of it will be posted online, making them appear cooler, more exciting, thinner, happier. Is this necessarily bad? Maybe not. But weird? Without a doubt. Because what happens when it crashes? Or when we -gasp- have to start paying to use Facebook? Who will validate our existence then? Facebook has evolved beyond a device to facilitate communcation; it has become a way to reinvent ourselves.